In today’s podcast we were delighted to be joined by the presenters of the top scientific abstracts for the Annual Assembly of the American Academy of  Hospice and Palliative Medicine (AAHPM) and the Hospice and Palliative Medicine Nurses Association (HPNA).  Eric and I interviewed these presenters at the meeting on Thursday (before the pub crawl, thankfully).  On Saturday, they formally presented their abstracts during the plenary session, followed by a wonderful question and answer session with Hillary Lum doing a terrific job in the role of podcast host moderator.

Our three guests were Marie Bakitas, who conducted a trial of tele/video palliative care for Black and White inpatients with serious illness hospitalized in the rural south; Yael Shenker, for a trial of patient-directed Prepare-for-your-care vs. facilitated Respecting Choices style advance care planning interventions; and, Na Ouyang, who studied the relationship between prognostic communication and prolonged grief among the parents of children who died from cancer.  From just the abstracts we had so many questions. We covered some of our questions on the podcast, others you can ponder on your own or in your journal clubs, including:

• Marie’s tele/video palliative care intervention was tailored/refined with the help of a community advisory board. Does every institution need to get a community advisory board to tailor their rural tele-palliative care initiative (or geriatrics intervention) to the local communities served?  Who would/should be on that board? How to be sensitive to the risks of stereotyping based on recommendations from the few members of the board to the many heterogeneous patients served?

• Advance care planning has taken a beating. For the purposes of a thought exercise, no matter what you believe, let’s assume that there are clear important benefits. Based on the results of Yael’s study, should resources be allocated to resource intensive nurse facilitated sessions (Respecting Choices), which had significantly better engagement, or to low resource intensive patient-facing materials (Prepare), which had significantly less engagement but still plenty of engagement (e.g. 75% vs 61% advance directive completion)?

• One interpretation of Na’s study is that clinicians can lean on the high levels of trust and high ratings of communication to engage with parents of children with cancer about prognosis.  Another interpretation is that clinicians avoided telling the parents prognosis in order to bolster their ratings of trust and communication quality.  Which is it?

• Bonus: Simon says he composed the song Sounds of Silence in a dark echoing bathroom about his concerns that people had stopped listening to each other in the 1960s (still resonates, right?).  Garfunkel says Simon was writing about Garfunklel’s friend and college roomate Sandy, who was blind.  Who’s got the right of it?

Enjoy!

-Alex Smith